But a lot has changed since then in the world of Facebook. As I'm currently putting together a presentation for the upcoming Econsultancy Digital Shorts event in Manchester on Edgerank and other social algorithms, now seemed the perfect time to revisit the piece to update and expand it.

EdgeRank is one of the most important algorithms in marketing. Despite this, very few people have heard of it and fewer still can claim that they fully understand it.

EdgeRank is the name of the algorithm which Facebook uses to determine what appears in their users’ news feeds. The news feed is Facebook’s ‘Killer App’. There is a plethora of information available to Facebook users, and the newsfeed is the order in which it appears.

It determines which of your connections is the most important to you and thus appears most frequently, and which kinds of content should appear higher than others. For anyone seeking to market a product or service on Facebook it’s essential you understand how this algorithm works.

Understanding the rules of the algorithm and changing your tactics to reflect the system can make the difference between a business changing campaign and an embarrassing failure. Yet despite this huge importance very little has been written about the algorithm.